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January 10, 2013

Entropy & evolution, resistance & purification

I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with
Savitri. It is the mystery of mysteries. It is the super-epic, it is
super-literature, super-poetry, super-vision, it is a super-work even if one
considers the number of lines he has written. No, these human words are not
adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives, hyperbolas to
describe it. It is a hyper-epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is;
at least I do not find them. It is of immense value—spiritual value and all
other values; it is eternal in the subject, and infinite in its appeal,
miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more
you come in contact with this, the higher will you be uplifted. Ah, truly it is
something! It is most beautiful thing he has left for man, the highest
possible. What is it? When will man know it? When is he going to lead a life of
truth? When is he going to accept this in his life? This yet remains to be
known.

Sri Aurobindo has told us (c'est lui-même qui l'a dit) and we are
convinced by experience that above the mind there is a consciousness much wiser
than the mental wisdom, and in the depths of things there is a will much more
powerful than the human will.

All our endeavour is to make this consciousness and this will govern
our lives and action and organise all our activities. It is the way in which
the Ashram has been created. Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me
full charge of it (at that time there were only two rented houses and a handful
of disciples) all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and
each service was created not by any artificial planning but by a living and
dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress. The
present difficulties come chiefly from psychological resistances in the
disciples who have not been able to follow the rather rapid pace of the sadhana
and the yielding to the intrusion of mental methods which have corrupted the
initial working.

A growth and purification of the consciousness is the only remedy. Page
85

Latour’s _Reassembling the Social_ is indispensable reading on this.
His thesis is that these big terms do more to *obscure* than explain... As
Laruelle might argue, the problem with these big master-signifiers (society,
patriarchy, capitalism, racism, environment) is that they seem to
be saying something without really saying anything… “Society”
explains nothing, but is what we’re supposed to explain. Of course, much
of this goes unexplored in the humanities and social sciences because the
concept of entropy is completely absent from their thought and there is almost
no concept of work or energy at work in these theoretical frameworks.
There are either concepts or brute material things, but no work to
maintain them. No, the only agency is ideas. This is why Marx had
to turn Hegel on his head– he understood fatigue –but us
academics all forgot that. We forgot that everything is perpetually
disintegrating, subject to entropy, precisely because things require energy and
work. Who among us has written about fatigue save some spare pages in
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition that no one ever notices? …
Yet if we bothered to actually trace networks and get out of our
master-signifiers, we would discover that there are sites of resistance that we
never before imagined because we bothered to trace the network.

The Steubenville rape case along with
the horrific gang rape in India
has brought sexual violence to the media’s attention… I suspect that the
astonishing behavior of these men is indicative of a culture that normalizes
sexual violence… What I also find is disgusting is how quick the media is to
pathologize all of Indian culture after that horrible gang-rape while failing
to raise fundamental questions about misogyny, childhood abuse, domestic
violence and sexual violence that continues to terrorize women in this country.

Among the most sought-after schools in Delhi, The Mother's InternationalSchool,
Sri Aurobindo Marg, has come up with a baffling criterion for nursery admission
-- parents of the applicant should own a house in the city… A professor at
IIT-Delhi, which is right across the road, for example, will not be able to get
her child admitted in the school even if she is an alumna of the school.

The Mother had once called the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at
Pondicherry a veritable ... About Sri Aurobindo Among the leading
lights of India's resurgence the ...

Sri Aurobindo Reader - Page 113
- Makarand
Paranjape - Preview
It is this energy of the individual which is the really effective agent
of collective progress. The
State sometimes comes in to aid it and then, if its aid does not mean undue
control, it serves a positively useful end. As often it stands in the way
and ...

The
Aims Of Education - Page 248 - Promila
Sharma - Preview - One
seeks a collective reorganization,
something that would lead towards an effective unity of mankind: the other
declares ... It is in
answer to this pressing need that Sri
Aurobindo conceived the scheme of his International Center of
Education,...

Education
In Emerging Indian Society - Page 340 - Y.K.
Singh - Preview - Explaining this ideal of Sri
Aurobindo's scheme, The Mother said, "For all world
organisation, to be real and to be able to live, must ... It is only in me collective order and organisation, in a
collaboration based upon mutual goodwill that lays the...

The
Lives of Sri Aurobindo - Page 289 - Peter
Heehs - 2008 - Preview - The problem with this is that “it is this
energy ofthe individual which is the really effective agent
of collective progress.” If the individual is suppressed, society
suffers. Therefore, Aurobindo concluded, the “healthy unity of
mankind” cannot be...

Sri Aurobindo's ideal of human life -
Page 113 - M.
Rafique - 1987 - The development of this collective being and the individual is very closely related
with each other. The more conscious the individual is, the more conscious is
the collective being. The
growth of the individual, according to Sri Aurobindo, is very...

Understanding
Med. Physiology - Page 876 - Bijlani -
2004 - Preview - ... with asceticism. Swami
Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo have
made powerful pleas in the recent past for correcting ... The collective effort would
facilitate the elevation of the level of consciousness of the human race. This
point would ...